A small London publishing house was ecstatic last night about its star author's double whammy. After the surprise appearance on the Booker Prize short list of Irish-American author Brian O'Doherty, his first novel The Deposition of Father McGreevy has now achieved an even more coveted literary laurel - the shortlist for the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction prize.

The judges were seduced by the pulsating account of his hero's encounter with a sheep: "When I passed him he turned to look at me, and I saw those fine white lashes long enough to catch flies. Strange that a beast should have such beautiful lashes around eyes with as much expression as two marbles."

Many publishers would pay good money to keep their authors off the Bad Sex list. But Gary Pulsifer, of Arcadia Books, was thrilled.

"It's great news, isn't it?" he said. "I think he'll be absolutely delighted. We've already distributed 12,000 copies in England and Ireland, and this should sell a lot more of them. You know some Kerry councillor was so outraged he has declared a sort of fatwa on him? This should really get them going."

O'Doherty - beaten to the Booker prize by Margaret Attwood - is in distinguished company.

The shortlist includes Sean Thomas, for Kissing Engla, about a lad-mag journalist specialising in travel, lifestyle criticism and sex; Wendy Perriam, for Lying, in which the heroine betrays her devout Roman Catholic husband with an unemployed barman; Candida Clark, for The Constant Eye, a Eurostar thriller described by one excitable critic as "powerfully erotic, frighteningly beautiful"; Edward St Aubyn, A Clue To The Exit, of which the Literary Review's own critic said crossly that "from the point of view of anatomy whatever is going on here is rather hard to determine, however pleasurable it may have been to write; and Wendy Holden, for her excruciatingly titled Bad Heir Day.

The Literary Review editor, Auberon Waugh, commented: "Judging is always highly amusing."

The senior figure on the shortlist was John Updike, nominated at last for his Hamlet prequel, Gertrude and Claudius.